DESIGNING HYBRID AND FULLY ONLINE OW

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Although effective organization of writing course content, assignments, grading—everything that goes into teaching writing in any setting—is import- ant when teaching fully face-to-face, something about the regularity of the on- site meetings helps to make an onsite course feel unified and organized even when instructors have made no special design choices in this regard. The onsite instructional setting is probably the most natural for students and teachers in that both teachers and students are most familiar with it, and a potential sense of class continuity may emerge by virtue of that familiarity and the regular face- to-face meetings. A natural sense of organizational structure is not necessarily

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the case for either hybrid or fully online writing instruction, so the next section focuses on organizational strategies that can help both instructors and students navigate an OWC successfully. It will not surprise readers that a well-organized course is more likely to be effective than a poorly organized course, but such organization is a basic necessity in both fully online andhybrid writing courses. It is not something that will somehow take care of itself in either instruction- al setting, and developing a well-organized online course requires consciously thoughtful work on the instructor’s part.

Organization suggests that course objectives are laid out clearly on the LMS and reiterated (repeated, as Warnock, 2009, and Hewett, 2015a suggested) in a number of website pages throughout a syllabus and the course itself. A course di- vided into units, modules, or weeks is likely to benefit from having each of those divisions introduced with learning goals, ones clearly linked to general course ob- jectives. Basic organization of this kind (ideally) will help students to understand the why of what they are doing and, in turn, provide that important opportunity for intellectual and emotional presence. I have too often heard students com- plain about what they perceive to be busy-work in classes—including my own. In such cases, typically I learned that I had not made transparent enough the unit goals and how those were linked to course goals. For example, if we were writing paragraphs instead of full essays or creating outlines before starting rough drafts, it might have felt like busy-work disconnected from the supposedly real work of writing that was to be the focus of the course because I had not done a good job of connecting those activities to a bigger picture. Thoughtful course organization that includes reiteration of course and unit goals throughout can help give stu- dents a sense of why those small-scale activities are important.

Figure 2.1 is a screenshot of what students see in the Blackboard LMS in both my fully online and hybrid writing courses. Course and unit-specific goals help students to understand how pieces of the course are related and how or why materials are organized the way they are.

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As Figure 2.2 demonstrates, instructional units can be introduced with goals that help to outline what activities will be taking place. These unit-level goals in many cases can be tied back to course goals as a way of making course organiza- tion transparent. In other words, student are invited to see how what they do in an individual week, for example, is part of a larger overall structure.

The goals shown in these figures are not groundbreaking nor are they exhaus- tive for everything that we might cover in a given unit; indeed, some students may not even read them or, upon reading them may not comprehend them suf- ficiently (Hewett, 2015a). However, these statements provide the basic expected outcomes for the course and, by the end of a given OWC, I hope my students have done a lot more than accomplish the basic course objectives. Making these goals clear and reiterating them for students throughout a fully online or hybrid writing course can help to provide a sense of basic organization and purpose that might be missing for some learners when they are not meeting weekly with the same group of people in an onsite setting. These goals operate as textual remind- ers of what we are doing and why, whereas in the onsite, face-to-face course, I more likely would provide these reminders verbally in class.

One particular element of organization that is specific to the hybrid OWC is the coordination of the face-to-face and online instructional settings. In both settings, students should feel connected to the course and should feel they are participating in one, unified course whose onsite and online settings are equiv- alent in importance. In other words, the hybrid writing instructor should avoid giving students the sense that they are in a face-to-face class that is merely sup- plemented by online materials. Similarly, the hybrid writing instructor should create the course with such organizational unity that students do not feel that they are participating in two related, but ultimately separate, courses: a face-to- face course and a fully online course. Doing so can help prevent students from experiencing such courses as more than the credit-load for which they signed up (i.e., a three-credit course should not seem like a four-credit course just because

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it is hybrid).

In addition to stating course and unit-level learning goals as clearly and as often as possible, another organizational strategy is to make sure that students understand how the syllabus (which lists weekly course activities and assign- ments) is coordinated with the course as it exists in the LMS. In my hybrid OWCs that divide time weekly, for example, I label each unit in the course the same way on the syllabus that is intended to be printed and that is designed for online presentation (e.g., “Unit 1 – Introductions”). Within each unit on the syllabus, I list days we will meet onsite and generally which readings or activities we will be doing (without being too exhaustive); additionally, I always include, in line with useful repetition, a reminder of the online component. Figure 2.3 provides a typical example.

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When students then go into the LMS, they know to look for the “Units” area of the course where they will find units that correspond with each of the units identified in the syllabus. Figure 2.4 provides an example. Basic coordination be- tween the course schedule as revealed in the syllabus and the online component of the class helps students to see the two pieces of the class as connected rather than as two distinct endeavors.

Of course, the surface coordination that can be achieved through clear, re- dundant labeling will be part of a much deeper integration of what is occurring in the classroom and online. The work that students will find within each unit reflects what we have discussed in class. Sometimes the work that students com- plete online will then feed into what we cover in subsequent onsite meetings, which for fully online courses has to be accomplished digitally as well. For exam- ple, in the hybrid course, using student posts to online discussion boards as con- versation starters for subsequent face-to-face discussion is an effective approach. Classroom discussion does not have to start from scratch, nor does the instructor have to put forward the first idea. Seeing their online work made present in the classroom also helps students to see the mixed instructional settings of their hy- brid class as deeply related. In fact, making virtual discussion into physical and real-time onsite work also helps students to see themselves as members of a class both online and face-to-face.

Coordination between the online and face-to-face components of a hybrid writing course can be demonstrated in many ways. In the end, a hybrid writing

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course will, ideally, feel like one learning experience. Through good integration, students will feel as present online as they do onsite.

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The need for social presence is shared by both hybrid and fully online OWI. By social presence, I mean the idea of people in a course together, even if that togetherness is virtual and not physical. Addressing presence means creating op- portunities for learner engagement on the intellectual and the emotional levels. In other words, students are challenged, rewarded for creative thinking, and have the opportunity to demonstrate competency in a variety of ways. Further- more, students need the opportunity to care about what is going on in a course. They ideally care about what they are doing but also what others are doing. They, again ideally, believe that they are part of a group of learners engaging in interesting and challenging material and they express a sense of pride in accom- plishment. The course matters to them.

The term “ideal” is relative since I am talking largely about OWC design. That is, I am focused on what the instructor can control. Teachers can afford opportunities to students who in best-case scenarios will take advantage of them. But for whatever reason, some students will not take advantage of those oppor- tunities or see the value in allowing themselves to be invested—intellectually or emotionally—in any given learning opportunity. These situations are not in- structional failures on the part of the teacher (and may not be infrastructural failures of the LMS either). Writing teachers tend to provide well-organized and interesting opportunities for learner engagement and they encourage that en- gagement, but the teacher’s work should not be judged on whether every single student becomes intellectually or emotionally connected to one particular writ- ing course because it is, in all likelihood, an impossibility. Hence, the notion of “ideal” is just that—a generally unreachable goal of perfection.

OWI Principle 11 called for “personalized and interpersonal communities” (p. 23) to foster student success. Experience has shown that successful writing instruction in both hybrid and fully online learning situations is most likely to occur when instructors and students are given the opportunity to be present, to realize that both teaching and learning are, as Warnock (2009) asserted, “per- sonality-driven endeavors” (p. 179). In other words, learning writing online (or in the traditional onsite setting, for that matter) should not be a solitary, passive experience. A Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for OWI makes abundantly clear that teachers and students alike need to be sup- ported in the endeavor to make learning to write in the hybrid and fully online formats an engaging, challenging, and ultimately rewarding experience.

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Creating opportunities for presence is one of the most important design guidelines for both hybrid and fully online OWI. In addition to scholarly re- search in this area (see, for example, Picciano, 2001; Savery, 2005; Whithaus & Neff, 2006), ultimately my personal experience as an educator causes me to see presence as crucial across instructional settings. The need for presence is grounded in OWI Principle 11, which stated, “Online writing teachers and their institutions should develop personalized and interpersonal online communities to foster student success” (p. 23).

When instruction shifts to the fully online environment, whether in the con- text of hybrid and fully online OWI, the learning situation can become isolating and even alienating for some students. It may feel like a correspondence course: each student works individually through material and communicates with a virtual “grader” who remains faceless. Being present as a virtual instructor— whether through photographs, text-based conversation, quirky posts, (Warnock, 2009), or personalized and problem-centered writing conferences and draft feed- back (Hewett, 2010, 2015a, 2015b)—is an important part of building overall student engagement and success.

What happens when student and/or instructor presence is lacking in OWI? Every online educator likely knows the answer to this question from experience: Students are less likely to engage; they are prone to participate insufficiently in the course; and, in the worst situations, they lose focus, fall behind and either fail or withdraw. As Julia Stella and Michael Corry (2013) indicated, “Lack of engagement can cause a student to become at risk for failing an online writ- ing course.” They cited studies suggesting that “exemplary” online educators are those who challenge learners, affirm and encourage student effort, and who “let students know they care about their progress in the course as well as their per- sonal well-being” (2013) To do any of this, let alone all of it, OWC instructors need to demonstrate presence in consciously purposeful ways. The hope is that when students experience the presence of others in a class with them (virtually or otherwise), they can feel supported in what they are doing.

The CCCC OWI Committee’s The State of the Art of OWI (2011c) report- ed that writing teachers generally see writing as both a generative and a social process. One respondent cited in the report said, “My online writing courses are intensely social and collaborative—much more so than my face-to-face writing courses. Students collaborate to produce texts” (p. 22). Educators surveyed for this report also indicated that they viewed the “ability to establish a presence online” as very important (76%) or important (23%), indicating the degree to which OWI practitioners value being present for students (p. 90). These survey respondents were speaking from their experiences and belief systems as OWC instructors. Like them, my consistent experience has been that students who are

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familiar with each other work better together and are more engaged in what is happening in a class, regardless of whether those students know each other (and know me) online, onsite, or some combination of the two.

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Effective hybrid and fully online OWC design often means taking what a teacher already does well in a writing class and adapting activities and assign- ments so that some or all of them occur online. Here is where the notion of migrating content and practices meets the needs for conscious adaptation and change for a different environment. However, as this chapter outlined earlier, the hybrid and fully online settings also present the opportunity to completely re-envision teaching and to start from the ground up, rather than thinking in re- lational terms alone. An effective approach to hybrid and fully online OWC de- sign that seeks to honor both the uniqueness of the instructional settings while preserving what is already most effective about one’s own teaching is to think in terms of course goals and learning objectives: in other words, goal-based design. Ultimately, both using what is already available and starting fresh can work together. Many instructors can name a classroom activity that seems to work well for them. In such activities, students are engaged. Class time is enjoyable for the instructor. And students produce good writing. But taking that particular classroom activity and trying to migrate it verbatim to the online setting might not be possible or advisable. The onsite and online instructional settings simply are too different in many cases. To take advantage of a good onsite activity, it is necessary to take a step backward and consider what course goal or objective is achieved with it. Does the activity do a good job of getting students to think critically or creatively? Does it get students attuned to nuances of language? Does it get students actively working with sources and evaluating information effectively? These are important course goals in many writing classes.

Once an instructor has a sense of the goals that are being achieved effective- ly in the onsite setting and of what seems endemic to the activities that foster student success relative to those goals, he or she can begin course design from the ground up. In other words, instructors are not obliged to work from a com- pletely clean slate when it comes to designing a hybrid or fully online OWC, but neither should they try to reconfigure every last classroom activity so that it can exist online.

For example, suppose that an instructor who typically teaches a fully onsite writing course wants to spur students to generate ideas about a text. To achieve this goal, she has her students work in groups for ten minutes at the start of class. In designing a similar activity for the online setting, however, it is difficult—and

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likely unproductive—to try to duplicate the face-to-face brainstorming activity by including a ten-minute chat-based synchronous session for her online stu- dents. First, that amount of time is probably too short a time for students to get situated online and to type meaningful ideas back and forth. Second, if the brainstorming activity includes shifting to synchronous conferencing software, there also is a likely time lag for getting students together; additionally, such software—even if available on the LMS—may introduce potential technical challenges (for both instructor and student) that can inhibit full participation by everybody in class and that may not meet the access needs suggested by OWI Principle 1 (p. 7). Indeed, although I have used Web-conferencing applications successfully in my own courses, their use simply to reproduce as closely as pos- sible what happens in the onsite, face-to-face environment seems more compli- cated than necessary given what it is likely to achieve.

Instead, while the goal of having her students brainstorm together remains, the teacher would do well to change the activity. For example, students could be asked to collaborate through an asynchronous discussion board or a group Wiki located within the LMS. When multiplied across the various activities that are developed for a writing course, the goal-based design approach likely will pro- duce an online course that looks drastically different from an onsite, face-to-face course—despite the fact that they share common basic learning goals.

Aycock et al. (2008) suggested that “performative learning activities may be best face-to-face” and “discursive learning activities may be best online” (p. 26).